Re:
Ranking On Google Places

I have heard that putting up backlinks to your places page helps too just lime any other page. I have been using my places page since there was one and rank #1 for my area and all my keywords.
I was soliciting reviews from clients years ago before anybody thought places would work.

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Re:
Ranking On Google Places

Quote:

Originally Posted by ohiohomedoctor

I have heard that putting up backlinks to your places page helps too just lime any other page. I have been using my places page since there was one and rank #1 for my area and all my keywords.
I was soliciting reviews from clients years ago before anybody thought places would work.

how do i put up backlinks to place page? never heard of this technique.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

Quote:

Originally Posted by contractorjay

ranking in google places. our website has way way way more original content than 95% of our competitors. 2-3 blogs a week. but almost never ranked on first page in google places. i even see fly by night contractors ranking higher than us. whats up with this?

Places or G+ is very important especially with in our trade. It shows your phone number right away.
There are many reasons why you do not rank on places. Content has nothing to do with your places page.
It depends how many people see your places page
How many reviews you have ( do not try to get fake once unless you are a SEO guy your self, G is constantly updating and if you do spam your page with fake reviews you will get punished latter on)
Motivate your clients to leave a review on G+

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

Quote:

Originally Posted by contractorjay

ranking in google places. our website has way way way more original content than 95% of our competitors. 2-3 blogs a week. but almost never ranked on first page in google places. i even see fly by night contractors ranking higher than us. whats up with this?

Alot of changes going on right now as google is implementing the new changes...hang in there. Since you state your actively blogging, start using some of that content on your +plus page.

My best advice is to follow all rules, no spamming stuff, and USE your page, make the postings...just simply go in and post what you did that day or that week...

EX: We are working @ such and such neighborhood or street and completed a bathroom makeover, etc....

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

i'm a bit confused. So is +plus page like twitter and facebook now? i dont even see an option where i can blog. would it even matter b/c we have our own blog on our website?

Publish posts

Once people are following your page, how do you start talking to them? You can use your stream to post relevant content, including photos and videos, and even engage your followers directly by asking questions that start discussions. You can make your posts public so people can find them using search, or use Circles to tailor specific messages to specific followers.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

Quote:

Originally Posted by contractorjay

....would it even matter b/c we have our own blog on our website?

Yes it matters.

If you want to get preferential treatment, you gotta give Google want it wants....fresh consistent content being shared on its platform. If your postings are public, they will be served up to searchers in the results, who may be your potential customers.

Same goes for your website, keeping that fresh means the google spiders will come and crawl your page more frequently to see whats new, and your rankings will improve over time.

Your postings need to include the keywords your wanting to rank for, but in a normal conversational manner, nothing spammy.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

NAP (name, address, phone number) is very important for local rankings. You need to make sure it is the same on all of your sites (e.g. website, Places/Local+ listing, Yelp, online directories, etc.) so Google sees them all as one (and therefore credits you these citations).

For example, if your address is:

123 street, suite 1234

It needs to be exactly that, not:

123 street, STE 1234

on one listing and then the first example on another. At the bare minimum, you need it exactly the same on your Places/Local+ listing and your website.

Placing your address in the header or footer of your website, in addition to a "contact" page is helpful as well.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

Everything the brand guy says is golden, one more thing of note. I have noticed a contact page is hurting the local score of the home page. My suggestion is to use some microdata markup and put the address in the top 3rd of the index page. Make the contact page a nofollow. For authority you will need some mention of the city you service, as a topic, somewhere in the lower 3rd of the body.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

Quote:

Originally Posted by BrandWrench

NAP (name, address, phone number) is very important for local rankings. You need to make sure it is the same on all of your sites (e.g. website, Places/Local+ listing, Yelp, online directories, etc.) so Google sees them all as one (and therefore credits you these citations).

For example, if your address is:

123 street, suite 1234

It needs to be exactly that, not:

123 street, STE 1234

on one listing and then the first example on another. At the bare minimum, you need it exactly the same on your Places/Local+ listing and your website.

Placing your address in the header or footer of your website, in addition to a "contact" page is helpful as well.

NAP would be a great start.

There's also no value to backlinking to your actual Places page.

Hope that helps.

The address advice is valid but since places+local results are now indexed I think ignoring backlinks for these pages will cost you if not now but in the near future.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

I'm a big fan of contact information in the header and footer for usability reasons. Your website is an engine for people to contact you, so make it as easy as possible.

I wouldn't recommend nofollow for the contact page.

Backlinking the local page may be beneficial down the road, but backlinking the actual Places hasn't been beneficial to this point. Save backlinking efforts for the website to build authority instead.

Getting the NAP correct is good and then the next piece of low hanging fruit would be to make sure the category selection is based off of solid keyword research. You only have to pick one default category and the other four can be custom.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

@Brandwrench, why pass page rank to the contact page, it almost always has a lower score? The contact page does point to the home page. Contact >>> to Home is always better. Learn some basic seo or give a valid reason why not to do this instead of your belief.

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

@doorrepairsac - We used to do internal page link sculpting, but find it to be ineffective now. PR sculpting using this strategy used to work before they made a change to PageRank in 2009.

I wouldn't nofollow any internal links, and instead let PageRank flow within the site. There are exceptions, of course, such as a login page.

Now, nofollowing links evaporates the PageRank rather than sculpting it. For example, Page 1 links to page 2, 3, and 4. Let's say page one is the home page in this example and page 4 is the contact page.

Page 1 has 9 "votes" of link juice to pass along to these other pages. Page 1 passes 3 votes each to pages 2, 3, and 4.

You nofollow the link to page 4. Page 1 now passes 3 votes to page 2, 3 and no link juice to page 4. Three votes are lost with the nofollow…they don't get added to pages 2 and 3.

A better approach is to save nofollow for pages you don't trust (why are you linking to those then?) and links to pages that search engines may not understand (like a shopping cart).

Re:
Ranking On Google Places

If you’re trying to rank your primary key phrase on page 1, why would you want to pass any of its authority to pages you’re not trying to rank or index? All the fluff, non keyword pages like about us, contact us, privacy policy should only send their authority to the home page. The indication of a home page has minimized the effect but unless your robots file has a no index tag on these pages proceed at your own risk.

If on the other hand some of the other pages have a keyword you’re trying to rank, I create a separate index page in its own folder that does point to the home page and the home page points back vertically.

As far as page sculpting having no effect, that's not what my test results have shown. Especially linking horizontally boosting a sub page that has more valuable traffic or having many index pages that would equalize the authority within the same site.

I have had the contact page rank above my home page before due to googles authority system and have since learned to be careful with my linking.

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